


opened to unaccustomed light

by alamorn



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Phone Sex, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:42:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24816280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/pseuds/alamorn
Summary: The conference calls go on.
Relationships: Gerri Kellman/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 63





	opened to unaccustomed light

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this poem](https://allpoetry.com/poem/5633977-Pygmalion-and-Galatea.--a-Greek-Myth.--by-Hugh-Wyles).
> 
> Someday I'll write a plot for them, but for now, here, have a character study with insults.

Gerri had always kept an eye on Roman. Previously, it had been from a legal concern -- of all the Roy children, he seemed the most likely to get into the kind of trouble that would require a lot of work to smooth over. Kendall had always been primarily _self_ -destructive, and drugs weren't really illegal for the rich, anyway. He had too ingrained a sense of shame to make the showy sorts of problems that would require effort on Gerri's part. Shiv had the most self-control of the lot of them, not that that was saying much. But Gerri had always expected any trouble she got into to be outside of the purview of Waystar Royco. Oh, sure, someday she would brought in front of Congress for something awful and sordid and against the great ideals of democracy, but that wouldn't be _Gerri's_ problem. She didn't think about Connor when he wasn't in front of her, which wasn't, she would easily admit, in her favor, but it was so hard to keep him in mind. He was such a nothing, never meant for great heights, and not attempting them, regardless of his so-called Presidential aspirations.

Roman, on the other hand, Gerri kept close tabs on. Every year that he did not burn down a building, or walk naked through the streets, or go on live television and call someone a _cocksucker_ , Gerri counted as a victory. He was impulsive, attention-seeking, just intelligent enough to make quite a lot of trouble if he ever set his mind to it. Of course she watched him.

Well, not her, personally. She had people for that sort of thing, and she hadn't even used them for a few years now, since he'd gotten out of his bizarre, post-adolescent obsession with Craigslist hookups. Now she just had a Google alert set up for his name.

(She did, of course, have alerts for all the family. It was just that Roman's was the one that came up most often.)

Now, since he'd approached her, tentatively, backhandedly, seeking advice, she kept an eye on him for his own benefit, not just Waystar Royco's. She even found she liked him, not that he made it easy.

She liked him even more once she found out she could call him a shivering pimple of a man and not get fired for it.

Their arrangement -- which sounded so seedy, which, of course, it _was_ \-- worked well for her. Gerri had decades of frustration and bitten back insults ready to go. The Roys themselves might have been able to walk through boardrooms, screaming about fucking and being fucked, but Gerri was held to a higher standard. She was not a Roy, after all, not the head of any company, and, most of all, not a man. Instead, horribly, she was a woman, middle-aged, with the kind of face that made men think of their mothers, and the complexes they had about them. It was what it was, but it was also a great relief to be able to say, out loud, exactly what she thought.

It was not _all_ she thought, of course, but Roman did not call her, pants already unzipped, voice seesawing with neediness and prickly, abashed fury, to hear that she thought he would be a fine COO someday, if only he could manage his impulses a little better, if only he could turn his creativity for insults and digs against his siblings into concrete actions. 

Those weren't conversations for late nights, Roman's voice hitched and broken. "What am I?" he asked her constantly. "What am I?"

A disgusting little worm, she told him one night. A pathetic popinjay, a vain little cockroach, a mess not worth cleaning up, and so disgusting he'd love it if she just left him to wallow in his own filth.

He'd come with a bitten off sob, and she'd hung up, hand already sliding past her waistband. He might have been a mess, but Gerri had never shied away from a bit of dirty work.

"What am I?" he asked. "What are you going to do to me?"

The shift in the script made her pause, just a moment, but long enough that she could hear him start to retreat, hear the gasp and the, "Sorry, Jesus, what the fuck is --"

"You know the story of Pygmalion and Galatea?" she said sharply, cutting him off before he could get too far into his own head.

"Yeah, I know the story of Pygmalion and Galatea," Roman scoffed, and they seemed to have switched tracks entirely in his mind. He was no longer breathy and needy, but offended. "I'm a fuck-up, I'm not an idiot. I got the whole fucking... Classics education, because who needs to know how to do geometry when you can drop a fucking myth in the middle of --"

"Roman," she said, when it became clear he would keep talking until she stopped him. "I'm not asking for a dissertation on the failures of your upbringing. I know them. I'm telling you what I'm going to do you."

"Oh," he breathed. Then, hesitantly, "Yeah?"

"Yes," she said, switching the shoulder the phone was on, giving herself an opportunity to stretch out her neck. "Right now, you might be an unformed pile of shit, but even shit can be given a shine."

"You gonna make me a real boy?" he asked, and she could hear how wet and desperate he was.

The hardest thing about these... conference calls, as Roman referred to them, was that sometimes he wanted to be abused, and sometimes he wanted to be reassured, and it was sometimes hard to tell which was which. But if she went too far, she justified, he had no one to blame but himself. "I didn't say that." He sucked in a breath, on the cusp. "I might start with something more manageable, like a dildo."

He grunted, the now familiar sound of his release. After a moment, his breathing evened. "So, when I'm a shit-dildo," he said, "am I finally going to get to clear those cobwebs out?"

"And catch something from you?" she said, letting her voice warm with amusement. They were past the part where he wanted only her disgust. "No, I think I'll just put you out as a conversation piece."

"Like you're proud of me?"

"A master craftsman is encouraged to show off her work." She held the pause for a while, to let him writhe, before she relented. "And yes, I think you'll be quite an impressive piece."


End file.
